Tetchiness and Twizzles

Ice dancing is to sports as the revelation that members of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s staff turned, in distress, to a bullying hotline is to political scandals: a little ludicrous, but you just can’t look away. One wouldn’t have wanted to miss Brown, on Britain’s Channel 4, saying, “I have never hit anybody in my life”—it made “I am not a crook” sound sort of statesmanlike—or an ally defending him as merely “tetchy.” The “bullying row” is not as laughable as, say, the eighties-style airbrushed women’s faces on the costumes of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, the top Russian pair, for Monday night’s free dance, or the NBC commentators’ ruminations on the cultural meaning of the “Hava Nagila,” but reading about Brown’s alleged tantrums, one wonders: Does 10 Downing Street have a kiss-and-cry area?

If Bullygate has tetchiness, ice dancing has twizzles—that seems to be the actual technical term for one of the sport’s “required elements.” And, this year, ice dancing had its own political scandal: the original dance Domnina and Shabalin performed Sunday was inspired, or rather suggested, by Australia’s aboriginal culture, but made actual aboriginals pretty angry, what with the eucalyptus-frond headdress, the loin cloths, and the faux body paint. (The evening’s theme was folk dances, which explains, sort of, why a number of couples were dressed like Martians trying to blend in at a truck stop somewhere west of Laramie.) Domnina and Shabalin did tone down the costumes for the Olympics—that is, they changed the tone of their unitards from brown to taupe, so that they seemed less like full-body black face. And they met with the chief of the Olympics’ Four Host First Nations—the ice dancing equivalent of the bullying hotline, perhaps. The chief gave them a traditional Coast Salish tribal group blanket, in which they literally wrapped themselves after their first dance. But no blanket could hide the aesthetic madness of it all. The best thing that could be said about the Russians’ aboriginal costumes is that the ones they wore the next night—the ones with the strange faces on their bellies and hips—were worse. (But were they worse than the get-ups Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto had on? Tough call.)

Domnina and Shabalin got the bronze medal. The silver went to pad America’s medal count (the Germans are catching up), and the gold to a pair of Canadians, Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue—which is quite a name. It’s as though Dick Tracy’s girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, had her name translated into French and then back into English again. (Canadians can sound that way.) But one hopes that she was never teased about it; the bullying hotline is busy enough as it is.